I played around for a couple of hours with open office and inkscape to creating svg and pdf files to import into scal3 software. Under no condition will the text show up from any program or any file format that is svg or pdf. lines, circle, rectables, show up no problem, but not any text. What am I not understanding??

In Inkscape, once you get your text the way you want it, you need to convert it to path. Not at my computer at the moment ,so not exactly sure what menu item you need to use, but I think it is under the path menu.The text in SCAL works great, is there a reason you can't do your work in SCAL?

Diane in Colorado SpringsThe best angle from which to approach any problem is the try-angle.

Hello there! Just adding to this in case anyone uses Illustrator instead of Inkscape like I do.

I was having a similar issue with PDF and SVG files not importing the text on my file. However I use Illustrator, not Inkscape. My solution was similar, I opened my file (PDF or SVG, doesn't matter) in Illustrator, then selected only the text and then chose:

Type -> Create Outlines

I then save my file and import into SCAL and viola! it works!

Even though I could use SCALs text tools to recreate the text, it would be a tedious task for me for this particular project. I'm using a Pepakura file (PDO) that has an unfolded 3D object design with many pages that all have a lot of text. I convert that to a PDF, which I can then import into SCAL to print and cut. I needed the numbers on the unfolded object as they help you line up your cuts when you put the whole thing back together.

I print from SCAL to my printer with the numbers showing (I use standard card stock), then I turn off the numbers (by hiding the layer) and cut the object out after aligning with the registration marks.

I have an extra step that I'll have to do now for the numbers, but once the project is loaded into SCAL, I can use my file over and over again to create the 3D object as much as I like.